Advance Health Care Directives and Living Wills for West Covina Residents

Focus on the treatment preferences you want understood

A useful planning conversation begins with what you want your directive to communicate. Think about the kinds of health-care decisions for which you want your preferences recorded, and whether there are particular circumstances or outcomes you want to discuss. The goal is to make your wishes clear enough to be understood by the people who may need to refer to them.

An advance health care directive can express health-care wishes and identify someone to make health-care decisions. This page focuses on the written-wishes part of that planning. Choosing a person to make decisions is a separate consideration; you can bring any questions about that choice to the consultation without treating it as the same task as describing your preferences.

• Write down the questions or treatment situations you want to discuss.
• Note any preferences you want to communicate, as well as areas where you are uncertain.
• Consider what you would want a person relying on your written wishes to understand.

Gather useful information before a remote consultation

A little preparation can help keep a virtual meeting focused on the decisions you want to make. You do not need to arrive with polished legal language. Instead, collect the information that will help you explain your priorities and identify what remains unresolved.

If you already have an advance health care directive or other planning documents, have them available to discuss. Also make a short list of questions about how your wishes should be expressed and how the document can be kept accessible. Preparing and keeping relevant documents accessible is distinct from registering information about an executed directive.

• Bring any existing advance health care directive you want to review or discuss.
• Prepare a concise list of preferences, uncertainties, and questions.
• Think about who should know where the document is kept so it can be found when needed.

Keep health-care and financial planning roles distinct

An advance health care directive concerns health-care wishes and health-care decisions. A financial power of attorney serves a different role involving financial matters. One document should not be assumed to communicate the instructions or authority addressed by the other.

As you prepare, identify whether your questions concern treatment preferences, who may make health-care decisions, or financial decision-making. That simple distinction can help direct the conversation to the right document and avoid leaving an important question unstated.

• Separate health-care questions from questions about financial authority.
• If you have both kinds of documents, keep track of which concerns each one addresses.

Make the document findable and consider registry questions

A written directive is useful only if the people who may need it can locate the relevant information. Think through where you plan to keep your documents and who should know how to find them. This is a practical planning step, separate from deciding what your treatment preferences should say.

California provides a registry resource for information about an executed advance health care directive. Preparing and keeping the document accessible is not the same as registering information about it. If you want to understand whether registry information could help in your circumstances, raise that as a separate question during your consultation.

• Decide how you will keep the document accessible to the people who may need it.
• Ask whether you have questions about the registry and what information it concerns.

Use the consultation to clarify the next step

Before the meeting, identify your main objective: putting treatment preferences into writing, making sure those preferences can be found, or sorting out how the written instructions relate to choosing a health-care decision-maker. Bring existing documents and the questions you want answered. A focused discussion can help clarify what information is still needed and what planning question should be addressed next.